captaind's Full Review: J. K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fir...
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the fourth in the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series of books. Harry is a boy who found out at age 11 that his parents were of the magical persuasion and were killed when he was just a year old by a Dark Wizard called Lord Voldemort. (His Uncle and Aunt told him they were killed in a car crash.) On finding this out he is able to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he gets up to all sorts of mischief, learns how to perform magic, gets into all sorts of adventures, and slowly learns about his parents and himself. The curse that was supposed to kill him rebounded onto Lord Voldemort, who lost almost all of his power at that point, but the crafty old Dark Lord has been trying to get back ever since, only to be thwarted by Harry again and again.
The story takes a while to get back to Hogwarts (via life with Harry’s extremely dislikeable “muggle” relatives – muggles are what Wizards etc call non-magical folk), who treat Harry like Dirt and generally try to make his life as miserable as possible, since the Quidditch World Cup is on. (Quidditch is the favourite game of the magical community, consisting of 7 players on broomsticks, one Quaffle, two bludgers, and a snitch… but I’m not about to explain the game now, if you read the book you’ll find out, if not you don’t need to know!) Harry goes to the final with his friends, the Weasleys, among whom the youngest son, Ron, is his best friend. They also meet the Minister of Magic; Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Sports; Ludo Bagman, and Minister of International Magical Co-Operation; Barty Crouch, along with the Malfoys, a very rich “Pure Blood” wizarding family who Harry and chums dislike intensely – in fact the son, Draco, has been Harry’s enemy since they first met. Events after the match lead to tension between some of the important wizards, and the revival of an old tradition brings new faces, and new problems, to Hogwarts…
Without giving away any more of the plot, I can tell you that this is the most complex Harry Potter book so far (bear in mind that at the time of writing this review I haven’t read the 5th book and the 6th book has yet to be released), though that’s really not surprising given that it’s more than twice as long as the first couple of books were. (To read it's fits firmly in the "light entertainment" bracket rather than "epic" though.) Thats not all good news however as the plot seems to be stretched more thinly across the pages of the book than was the case in the earlier books. Characterisation is also deeper for the main characters, with the main difference being that they’ve now become aware of the opposite sex, which leads to some funny moments. There did seem to be rather a lot of throw-away characters though.
The writing style is still supremely readable with plenty of wit, and the set pieces thrilling, albeit the overall pace of the book is somewhat slower overall than the previous books, and does indeed seem a bit too slow in places. Despite this it was as compulsive reading as ever. For those unfamiliar with the preceding books, Rowling is occasionally at pains to fill in background detail that doesn’t always seem entirely necessary. This slows things up a bit more but doesn’t happen very often. The vocabulary used might stump younger readers at times, but it’s not exactly formidable so that’s not really a problem. (It’ll do them good to get the dictionary out anyway…) There are a few jokes and references thrown in that only adults are likely to get in this book too, such as the following passage which would be lost on (most) younger readers but that I enjoyed:
”… while a group of middle-aged American witches sat gossiping happily beneath a spangled banner stretched between their tents which read: ‘The Salem Witches’ Institute’”
Things like that helped to give the novel a bit more depth as far as I was concerned while the story had yet to really warm up, and once I’d got thoroughly into the story it looked for a long time that I would be giving this a 5 star ratings as I had done the previous book. The thing that really felt like a let down and prompted me to give this just 4 stars was the ending – it just made the book feel incomplete on its own, and to me even novels that are part of a series should tell a complete story in their own right, though obviously leaving the way open for the following book. Sadly I felt that the plot had finished abruptly just when it was starting to catch fire, which left me feeling rather disappointed – looking forward to the next book, of course, but still disappointed. Still a great read, but out of the first four books, my favourite is still The Prisoner of Azkaban (the third book).
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